Python, C and C++ efficiency on JPG thumbnail creation

There are several tools to make thumbnails: Imagemagick, PIL ,GD, and also EPEG/libjpeg. And we also can make Python modules from a C Epeg library and compare how much slower it will get if we use it from a scripting language like Python.

But there are also smaller libraries like Epeg from the development branch of Enlightment (E17) which uses only libjpeg to make thumbnails. Now which of them will be faster? And if we make Python modules from EPEG library how much slower they will be than the original C runtime?

Python Imaging Library - the thing you would use in Python to make thumbs. It also has some filters like ANTIALIAS and SHARPEN which increase the quality of the thumbnails. Test script looks like this:

If we use a Python module of a C "application" we loose here about 10% of it's speed, which isn't much compared to PIL, or IMAGEMAGICK "convert". In case of EPEG there is a problem with no anti-alias filters, and without that (and sharpen) some thumbnails will be fuzzy and unacceptable :)